midnight mooncake meltdown

ok so enough kumbayaing. it's midnight. i'm in the business class (royal silk! (sounds better than it is)) lounge in the bangkok airport. and i am meeting my nemesis. well, not meeting so much as we are in fact well-acquainted. but confronting is more like it. (appropriately, and i kid you not, a cheesy piano version of 'don't cry for me argentina' is playing.) this nemesis is in fact a small pastry*, so really no match for me at all. and yet. and yet, my cackles are up. aside from all of the joy of spaciousness and space and sea and sky and sunshine and such, a very exciting added joy of this particular escape was avoiding the mid-autumn festival in china (zhongqiujie). i have nothing against celebrating mid-autumn, the new harvest, the new moon, the old moon, any moon at all really. my gripe against this particular holiday is entirely related to its signature food - the mooncake (yuebing). (collective sigh of relief. anyone out there who has ever endured one knows what i'm talking about but is afraid to verbalise. it's ok, exhale and continue.) the truth is, the chinese culture has created many amazing things (in fact, perhaps all amazing things). it is an ancient and great culture with an ostensibly equally ancient and great culinary history. that said, you'd think that someone somewhere along the last five thousand years of great creative civilization would have stood up and said, 'these yuebing bite, and i don't mean in a good way, so let's do something about it'. mooncakes are simply bad. terrible, even. and the traditional kinds only seem to get worse. it's a texture thing (we used to joke in my family that they were really best used as hockey pucks). it's a flavour thing (they even make my beloved red bean bad). it's just a mooncake thing. (also, let's be honest, nothing with an egg yolk inside should be preserved for an extended period of time. at least i don't think so.) i have never met a mooncake i can say i truly liked. except for non-mooncake mooncakes. because apparently the chinese civilization was content with the status quo and re-gifting the same seven boxes of nasty egg-yolk-centered, hockey puck pastries for centuries, it took in the intervention of hagen daaz and other foreign devils to lead a small mooncake revolution**. to wit: ice cream mooncakes, chocolate mooncakes, this year i've even heard of cupcake mooncakes. anyway, i avoid mooncakes with a passion (that cannot be chased indoors for anything! (geesh, i am so dramatic sometimes when i'm over-thinking***)). thus, i was especially pleased to avoid this year's mid-autumn festivities altogether and escape to thailand. i avoided feigning delight at receiving another box of (re-gifted) mooncakes; i avoided re-gifting them myself; i avoided having to pretend to eat a piece of one in the presence of others (although thankfully that rarely happens, i think we all collectively avoid eating them in public, it allows the same seven boxes to be re-gifted indefinitely)); i avoided all of it. or so i thought. until i arrived in the royal silk lounge, sat comfortably in my generic boring airport lounge chair, and found myself staring down an abandoned mooncake on the table next to me. now, mooncakes were not a part of our complimentary buffet this evening so how this fiend found his way before me, i know not. but we are currently in a bit of a showdown here in the silk lounge. mr. mooncake vs. meiling and all that is good and sacred (ok, so maybe i'm dramatic even when i'm not over-thinking). i suspect that i will win this particular battle for two reasons. 1 - i am a person, he is a pastry. 2 - he will very soon be tidied up by the silk lounge staff and swept swiftly into oblivion. i, meanwhile, will board my flight and arrive bleary-eyed back in beijing in all its mid-autumn glory. kumbaya.



*line from a book i just read that i appreciated - a first impression of paris: scowling grey universe relieved by pastry. nothing like clinging to a tarte tatin or a croissant for katharsis, weather-related or otherwise.

**curious, at dinner with a commercially-minded entrepreneur friend in bangkok this evening, he noted how all of the great chinese entrepreneurs of the last decade basically just took a foreign business concept, copied it, translated it into chinese and made bazillions. query whether there is some common thread here related to the inability to innovate the mooncake without outside intervention.

***a new guy friend who visited this blog recently said he found it a bit much. i asked which part was more upsetting, the over-thinking or the over-sharing. he blinked very rapidly a few times and changed the subject. i smiled at life.